The Snow Leopard

An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas. In September in the autumn of 1973, the writer and explorer Peter Matthiessen set out with field biologist George Schaller to journey 250 miles to the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan plateau, into the heart of the Himalayan region of Dolpo, high into the remote mountains of Nepal, a remote, culturally Tibetan region in the upper Dolpa District of northwestern Nepal, to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard, a creature so rarely spotted as to be nearly mythical. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty.By the end of their expedition, having seen wolves, foxes, rare mountain sheep, and other denizens of the Himalayas, and having seen many signs of the snow leopard but not the cat itself, Schaller muses, "We've seen so much, maybe it's better if there are some things that we don't see."First published in 1978, The Snow Leopard is rightly regarded as a classic of modern nature writing. Guiding his readers through steep-walled canyons and over tall mountains, Matthiessen offers a narrative that is shot through with metaphor and mysticism, and his arduous search for the snow leopard becomes a vehicle for reflections on all manner of matters of life and death. In the process, The Snow Leopard evolves from an already exquisite book of natural history and travel into a grand, Buddhist-tinged parable of our search for meaning.